Six months ago, over 13,000 Elite: Dangerous players set out on a massive expedition to cross the known galaxy. As testament to how long and gruelling a trip that was, less than 4,000 survived the trip.
One of the participants (Qohen Leth) has, via RPS, helpfully broken down some of the statistics involved in the trip, and the numbers are staggering.
13,615 pilots registered for the expedition, hailing from 75 different countries around the world. The vast majority (over 10,000) were on PC, with around 1500 playing on both PS4 and Xbox One. Combined, those pilots spent over 18 years in hyperspace.
Only 3,747 pilots made it to the end at Beagle Point, with the rest just...not making it, whether down to crashes, running out of fuel or whatever other dangers are lurking in the darkest depths of space. Note that “death” isn’t a big deal in terms of the overall game, players can just respawn, but dying during the trip usually meant you dropped out, since it would be too hard to catch back up to everyone again.
In total, over the 152 days the fleet was in transit, it travelled 1,118,000,000 light years.
If you want to see the trip broken down into even more granular figures, you can check out the complete set of stats here. And if you were wondering what the trip looked like, that gallery we ran the other day was put together by a player involved in the expedition!